SUSTAINABILITY
Newcastle Trust ‘leads way’ on climate change action
Last summer The Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, one of England’s largest acute teaching hospital Trusts, which reportedly operates more specialist services than any other, became the world’s first healthcare organisation to declare a Climate Emergency – a move backed by its Chief Executive and Board in response to climate experts’ warnings that at the current rate the world stands little chance of meeting the greenhouse gas reduction emission targets set out in the Paris Agreement of 2015. As HEJ’s editor, Jonathan Baillie, discovered when he spoke by phone with the head of Sustainability, James Dixon, the milestone was the latest step in over a decade’s work by the Trust to embed sustainability across its activities wherever, and whenever, possible.
The Trust’s concerted drive to operate more sustainably in a raft of different areas – from increasing the volume of non-clinical waste it recycles, and sending zero waste to landfill since 2011, to reducing its use of anaesthetic gases with a high Global Warming Potential (GWP) at its two acute hospitals in Newcastle – the Freeman Hospital and the Royal Victoria Infirmary – was highlighted at a packed IHEEM CPD regional seminar held on 30 January this year at St James’ Park, the home of Newcastle United FC. There, at an event kindly sponsored by Sharpsmart, a mixture of IHEEM members, other Trust personnel (joined by staff from other north-east England NHS Trusts), supplier representatives, architects, construction personnel, and senior university staff, heard from three speakers on some of the wide range of carbon-cutting initiatives taken by the Trust, Newcastle University, and local Passivhaus-certified architects – all playing their part in ensuring that large
public sector bodies contribute effectively to helping the UK meet the stringent carbon emission reduction targets set out in the Paris Agreement and the Kyoto Protocol. Speaking at the event – attended on IHEEM’s behalf by the Institute’s Marketing & Events manager, Melissa Glass, and COO, Tania Davies – were James Dixon, Matt Dunlop, his counterpart as head of Sustainability at Newcastle University, and Mark Siddall, Principal at Durham-based ‘low energy architectural practice’, LEAP, which dubs itself ‘Northern England’s leading Passivhaus architect and low energy consultant’.
A milestone for a healthcare organisation A significant focus of James Dixon’s presentation at an event which his colleague, the Trust’s director of Estates, IHEEM member, Rob Smith, had been keen to see staged, was the Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation
Trust’s landmark achievement in June 2019 in becoming – it believes – the world’s first healthcare organisation to declare a Climate Emergency. Since then – James Dixon explained when we spoke by phone and talked through in some detail his team’s work on a whole raft of ‘green’ measures over the past decade – he and his colleagues have been ‘inundated with interest’ from other Trusts keen to follow the organisation’s lead. With the Trust now seen as a leading NHS exponent of sustainability initiatives, he has also been asked to establish a new Shelford Group on ‘Sustainability’ in the NHS – via which Trust representatives can meet and share experience, expertise, and practical lessons, that other Trusts keen to strengthen their own sustainability focus can harness and benefit from. James Dixon explained that the bold move to become the world’s first healthcare organisation to declare a Climate Emergency – and thus to nail the Trust’s sustainability credentials firmly to the mast – had received the full backing of the organisation’s management, Board, and CEO, Dame Jackie Daniel, and the Trust is now targeting achieving net zero carbon by 2040, ‘if not sooner’. While an important milestone, the declaration was the culmination of a concerted Trust-wide focus on making all its activities as environmentally sustainable as possible set in train before James Dixon joined the Trust 10 years ago as its Waste manager.
IHEEM CPD seminar The entrance to the historic Peacock Hall at the Royal Victoria Infirmary.
He said of the IHEEM regional CPD seminar, titled ‘Your Climate Emergency Briefing’: Naturally we were keen to discuss, and people were keen to hear about, our declaration of a ‘Climate Emergency’, but without underestimating its significance, it was in fact just the latest development in a whole arsenal of carbon reduction measures that the Sustainability
July 2020 Health Estate Journal 49
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